You Can't Do It Alone: A New Guide to Creating Sustainable Change in Education Reform

Far too often, throughout our work in the education field, we've seen even the most earnest and promising ideas from experts and reformers for improving schools and ramping up student learning met with confusion, anxiety or even anger from teachers, parents, students or community members.

A new book from Jean Johnson provides a resource for education leaders on a variety of reform areas, including evaluating teachers, turning around low-performing schools, and building support for world-class standards. You Can't Do It Alone, from Rowman & Littlefield, summarizes a decade of Public Agenda opinion research among teachers, parents, and the public. It offers tips on what leaders can do to more successfully engage these groups in reform areas and integrates a theory of change and public learning developed by our founder Daniel Yankelovich. It also provides some practical rules of the road for promoting the kind of dialogue that leads to consensus and action.

To propel change-and to sustain it-school leaders need to listen thoughtfully to the community, act in ways that alleviate negative response and engage teachers, parents, students and the broader community in the mission of reform.